No Cables or Batteries, Just Pure Mechanical Engineering - This Swiss Cooling Fan Cools You For Free
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The other day when I opened youtube I was (surprisingly) shown a really interesting short video.
It was a video about something I later found out was called a Paillard clockwork fan, which allegedly is a 100% mechanical cooling fan. No batteries, cables or anything else. You give it a winding and allegedly it cools you for 30 minutes.
But these fans are ancient, they are from the early 1900s, they’re more than 100 years old, so I decided to look for a modern equivalent of one…..and I found nothing. There is no modern equivalent. Nobody makes this nowadays. All we have are fans that are plugged into the electricity grid or battery-powered. The only manual fans we have need to be continuously squeezed to run and they’re small, weak and your and gets very tired after just a few minutes.
And honestly this surprised me because there’s a market for this. Think about it, a lot of people want to live off-grid and electrical motors are very power hungry. There’s also a lot of people who live and/or work in hot remote areas where there’s no electricity. This would also be nice in a power outage because you also have your hands with you, and all you have to do is wind it up once in a while.
So I decided to try and build one myself, and if successful, I will offer the files for free. Obviously the first step towards making this is understanding how it works. Fortunately, the original video does give us some useful clues. The first thing we can observe is the geartrain of the fan. The only purpose of which is to increase the output speed. The fan blades themselves are our output and we want it to spin fast enough so that I can move a substantial amount of air quickly in order to cool us down.
The question is: what is inside the box below the gear train? Well, this is called a “clockwork fan”, we can hear and see winding and ratchething, and the short video mentioned a spring motor…and that tells me that inside this there must be a mainspring. And I know just the place where I can get one easily and for very little money. In a hardware store from any tape measure.
When you think about it mainsprings are the first “battery”, before we learned how to chemically store electrical energy, we learned how to store kinetic or mechanical energy! Sometimes in 15th century Europe somebody came up with the mainspring. It allowed us to store more kinetic energy far more conveniently and in a much smaller space than a hanging weight which was previously the norm. Mainsprings revolutionized our lives because they gave us the ability to take timekeeping devices with us, they made pocket and wrist watches possible. But even mainsprings were kind of inconvenient all the way up to the 1960s. It took us centuries to figure out the right allows and heat-treating processes to create the kind of spring steel that gave mainsprings the kind of yield strength and fatigue life that today we take for granted. A mainspring can be wound and unwound almost an infinite amount of times without loosing it’s shape or breaking. It is very strong and very elastic at the same time. Before the 1960s, mainsprings were the main cause of watch repair simply because they didn’t last as long. Of course you can find mainspring outside of watches and clocks in everything from toys to retractable dog leashes, egg timers and more.
Something I did on my model/prototype is that I decreased the gear module from bottom to top. The gear module is simply the tooth size of metric gears.
Larger teeth are obviously stronger a nd as such have higher load bearing capacity but are also noisier and less smooth which makes them better suited to low rpm and high torque
On the other hand smaller gear teeth obviously have a lower load bearing capacity but are smoother, quieter and more efficient at rpm which aligns perfectly with our application since our torque decreases and speed increases as we go up in the gear train.
I have also changed the pressure angle for the last gear pair which will operate at the highest rpm. A 14.5 degree pressure angle is smoother, quieter and overall better suited and more efficient at high rpm. It has poor shock resistance and is easier to strip with high torque, but we won’t really have any shocks or high torque by the time the torque is transferred to the top of the gear train.
A special thank you to my patrons:
Daniel
Peter Della Flora
valqk
Dave Westwood
Zwoa Meda Beda
Cole Philips
Allan Mackay
Sam Lutfi
Alex
00:00 Swiss Genius
03:37 To Make it We Need to Know How it Works
04:54 Mainsprings Were The First Batteries
11:54 Capturing a Mainspring
15:47 Fancy and Irrelevant Gear Specs
21:21 Good News and Bad News
25:55 V2.0
28:21 Saving my Shaft
30:07 Winding to Running Ratio
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